Twine + Arduino = <3

As spring approaches (at least in the northern hemisphere), we hope your Twine is bringing reports of warmer temperatures! We’ve got an exciting new external sensor ready, and some some details about Twine’s battery life for you.

Announcing the Twine Cloud Shield

Stack Cloud Shield on your Arduino, connect it to Twine, and get email, texting, calling, and more in a jiffy. With Cloud Shield, you can add the ability to trigger any Twine output from your Arduino sketch with three lines of code, so you can focus on your idea and not debugging networking code. Want to see how easy it is? Want to see how many bananas (spoiler alert!) we can fit in a minute long video? Check out the video. What could make this even better? For a limited time only, if you get a Twine + Cloud Shield kit now, you’ll get $10 off! Already have a Twine, but want the Cloud Shield? Free shipping for you (domestic only)!

In the video, you get a special sneak preview of a soon-to-be released notification method, phone calls! Your Twine will call you with the text you type in the action. It will be available as a paid option.

Battery life update

First of all, don't worry! We're not done reducing power consumption and are continuing to invest development resources into improving Twine battery life. The Twine 1.2 release not only added new features like vibration support, but also reduced the power used by the accelerometer and external port. Here's the situation at the moment:

1. In fixed installations, you can use virtually any micro-USB power supply to run your Twine. Here's one on Amazon with free shipping. Twine will automatically fall back to batteries if external power is lost.

2. This pie chart below shows how much power each Twine component uses.

As you can see, the WiFi radio accounts for about 76% of Twine's power consumption. That's a big, but unfortunately very necessary chunk! To further improve battery life, we have started a major rework of the way that the radio subsystem works. This effort will take some time to complete, but should make very significant reductions in the amount of power that the radio uses. We'll keep you updated as we get closer to release.

We've gotten to meet some of you at SXSW, and we're happy that we have all of you as backers — of Twine and of our passion for making our world smaller and friendlier through connected objects. Our team continues to work on making Twine better. As always, please email us directly at help@supermechanical.com if you're having any sort of trouble or haven't yet gotten your Twine reward, and we'll help figure it out.

Would it make sense to switch from wireless to bluetooth? Maybe with some kind of hub that would be powered to give better reception and transmission, but allow the individual twine modules get significantly longer battery life?

Superbacker

Superbacker

Mine (that I already recieved) did not come with a twine cable. I bought the shield-only. If you buy the twine+sheild, I'm sure it comes with the cable. Hey @Supermechanical, how soon can we get a schematic and sample code?